Here Comes the Weekend

July 25, 2024

I’m so sorry because I’m sure you now have “Here Comes the Sun” playing on repeat in your head. However, this is about the importance of radio on the weekends. Lately there has been a lot of buzz in the trade press about radio’s readiness on the weekend. This was obviously prompted by a couple of momentous events that happened on consecutive weekends. I’m not here to pontificate about what you should or should not do on the weekend at your stations. If you are a programmer, you already know all about this situation.

What I can say, however, is how important the weekend daypart is to your overall station’s ratings health. We’ve looked at data from around the country for a variety of formats, and there are some constants that appear on a regular basis.

I’m going to break this down into three format areas: music radio, News/Talk and Sports.

For most sports stations, the content that will drive weekend listening is play-by-play. You can see the ratings spikes during live games on the weekends. This is especially true for football. Baseball will also move the needle. Other sports will register to a lesser extent, depending on market passion and postseason success.

There are opportunities for News/Talk stations on weekends, especially in summer months when listeners are more active. This format can be a magnet early in the day as people plan their day and may tune in for traffic and weather information. Alas, many of these stations are making budget with brokered programming which draws very little interest. One caveat – we can see some real spikes for non-coms that are playing “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me.”

The formats that can greatly benefit from weekend listening are playing music. A successful music station will get 50% of their weekly cume tuning in to its weekend programming. This is a far greater percentage than what we usually see for spoken word formats and is also more than tunes in to your morning show. Plus, if you are recycling effectively, it can match your Midday and Afternoon tune-in percentages.

This can benefit both programming and sales.

We all know that attracting cume is hard, especially in a world of minimal or non-existent marketing budgets. That means the best way to increase shares with your current audience is to get more Average Weekly Time Exposed (AWTE) or Time Spent Listening (TSL). As a reminder, this number is affected by occasions (how often they tune in) and durations (how long they listen in each occasion). You have a better chance of getting repeat visits than you do of extending their stay. Getting that weekend cume to convert to another daypart can have a dramatic effect on your overall share.

For sales, weekends should never be a value-added throw-in. At the risk of repeating myself – half your audience is tuning in! These are people in their cars possibly heading to Home Depot or Olive Garden. Maybe those choices can be influenced with, you know, a commercial or two. To read more about the importance of radio on the weekends click here or here.

Remember, a quarter hour on Saturday counts just as much as one on Tuesday afternoon.

-Steve Allan, Programming Research Consultant

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